Thursday, November 24, 2011

Over the years we all seen our fair share of game shows. There are the classics, like Jeopardy and Wheel Of Forturne, flashes in the pan like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, The Weakest Link, and Deal Or No Deal, and show that were – in one way or another – duds. Million Dollar Money Drop, Show Me The Money (starring William Shatner), and of course Downfall (the one where if you don’t answer the questions in time your prizes – and in some circumstances your friend, and you – get dropped off a ten story building). In my opinion the new ABC series, You Deserve It, which debuted on Monday following a one hour episode of Dancing With The Stars, falls into the dud category.

The hook for You Deserve It (because every good game show needs a hook whether it’s answering in the form of a question or dropping the prizes off the side of a building) is that the players aren’t actually playing for themselves but for some person – or I suppose some organization though that isn’t clear – that the player thinks “deserves” the money. In the series premiere the woman who was playing the game was playing to benefit her best friend since college, a widowed mother of two young children whose husband drowned while diving. The woman was faced with bills that needed to be paid particularly health insurance (I’d like to point out that if she were Canadian she wouldn’t have to worry about that). The beneficiary of the game – who doesn’t know that she’s the beneficiary – is sequestered (in this case she and her kids went, or were taken, to a movie).

The show opens with host Chris Harrison (better known as the host of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette) introducing the player of the game and showing a tear-jerking piece about what makes the beneficiary deserving. Then the player, who is accompanied by some of the people who appeared in the introductory piece starts to play the game. I should mention here that the people who are with the player play absolutely no part in the actual play of the game. They’re entirely there for moral support.

The gameplay itself is pretty basic. The game has five rounds of increasing value: $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 and $250,000. There are three types of questions: Who, What, and Where. In each round the player has to identify the person, place or thing to win money. If they give the wrong answer they don’t get money for that round but do carry on to the next round. The player is given one “Free” clue. There are nine other clues available but each clue has a price. There are nine prices for clues, which are randomly assigned to numbers from 1 to 9. Each time a player decides to buy a clue after the “Free Clue” (which is so general as to be virtually useless; in one case the Free Clue was “White Collar” from which the player was supposed to deduce “Santa Claus”) they give a number. The value that has been assigned to that number is then deducted from the prize that the player is able to win. So, for example in the $250,000 round, if the player picks “8” first and “8” has a dollar value of $75,000, the maximum the Player can win is $175,000. So while theoretically the player can win $435,000 for the person they’re trying to help the reality is that they will win significantly less. The total of the nine levels is the same amount as that round’s value so if someone uses all nine clues in a round they’d get nothing. Needless to say the best policy is for the player to have an answer by the eighth clue.

Meanwhile the show’s other host, Brooke Burns (who I at least remember fondly from when she hosted Dog Eat Dog on NBC a few years back) hangs around the place where the beneficiary is being sequestered with more friends who are rooting for the player. That’s all she does for the first 50 or so minutes of the show (including commercials. In this particular episode she stands in the lobby of the theater with the beneficiary’s friends and introduces shots of the woman in the movie theater watching the movie with her kids and eating popcorn. At one point she “sneaks” up into the projection booth to do one of these intros, leading one to ask “Why?” But surely you say she comes into her own when the game ends right? Well not quite. Once the final round of the game is over and the audience knows how much has been won for the beneficiary, Burns leads the group of friends in the lobby into the theater, where the film is stopped and she reveals that they’re with You Deserve It and that there’s a special message for her from… Chris Harrison and the player projected onto the movie screen. That’s pretty much all that Brooke Burns has to do on the show.

I really don’t like the mechanics of this show. The random nature of how much is taken from the pot for each round is straight out of Deal Or No Deal but in this situation it really doesn’t feel “right” somehow. There is no linkage between the amount lost in each round and the quality of the clue that is given. Which is a problem when the first three clues are just about as useless as the "”Free Clue.” Still I guess I could forgive this in the name of randomness if it weren’t for the fact that I believe that for the most part players are going to be more cautious in taking a guess when they’re playing to win money for someone that that they have an emotional connection to than they might if they were playing to win money for themselves. The woman who played the game in the first episode averaged about six clues before she ventured an answer even though in a couple of cases she had the answer (or maybe should have had the answer) earlier. Then there were the friends who were with the player. They needed more of a role in this game than simply cheering the player on. For one thing they really didn’t get much chance to even fulfill that role. For another thing, these people could be a valuable resource for the player. There was at least one question where I could see one of the people (the beneficiary’s father-in-law) knew the answer a couple of clues before the player knew the answer. Even interviewing the friends about the beneficiary between rounds would have been better – particularly if that cut down on the segments of Brooke Burns doing nothing.

But my real problem with the show is tied to the very nature of the show. It is maudlin, mawkish and self congratulatory. It embodies all of those things that I came to dislike and then hate about ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Yes, I know that the people who participate on this show on behalf of their friends are sincere in their desire to help their friends. I just don’t like the way that this show goes about it. Chris Harrison comes across as particularly unctuous in this, and I can form no opinion of Brooke Burns because quite frankly I can’t see what she contributed to this show. I can’t even say that ABC has even a portion of its heart in the right place because this show has enough of being a cynical ratings grab that I find it off-putting. And based on the ratings, which lost a large percentage of the Dancing With The Stars finale lead-in and which were lower than the rating for the show that followed it (Castle), it would seem that the viewing public didn’t care much for the show either. With Dancing With The Stars off the air until March and “encore programming” (repeats) leading into it until it ends its run, expect the ratings for this mess to sink even lower. It is likely that You Deserve It will complete it’s intended six-week lifespan no matter how low the ratings go, if only because ABC doesn’t have anything that they can replace it with. If we’re all very lucky we won’t be seeing it again.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

What do you get when you take comedian Tim Allen, add a “manly” work environment with a work place friendship with a guy with facial hair, three kids (including one who makes with the wise cracks), and a real actress to play his wife? That’s right, you get Home Improvement, Allen’s 1991-99 series with Richard Karn, Zachary Ty Bryant, Jonathon Taylor Thomas, Taran Noah Smith, and Patricia Richardson.

Now take that show and turn the three boys into three girls, make the work place friend with facial hair into his boss (and friend) with facial hair, and replace Patricia Richardson with Nancy Travis, and what do you get? Tim Allen’s new show Last Man Standing.

In Last Man Standing, Allen plays Mike Baxter, the Marketing Director of a chain of sporting goods stores owned by Ed Alzate (Hector Elizondo), who also happens to be one of his best friends. In the past this has meant travelling to various places around the globe to shoot ads for their catalogues. However the catalogue is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the Internet Age, and Ed needs Mike to focus more on the website. The website includes videos for demonstrations of the merchandise, but Mike turns these into personal rants with only passing reference to the merchandise, but that doesn’t matter since his rants generate hits for the website, and as one of his younger employees tells Ed, “Hits are good.”. Though Ed is willing to let Mike go back on the road for the catalogue, he decides that maybe he should spend more time with his wife and daughters.

At home, Mike has to deal with his wife Vanessa (Nancy Travis) a normally level-headed woman who sometimes goes a bit overboard, and his three daughters. Kristin (Alexandra Krosney) is his oldest, a 20 year-old single mom (she has a life-long memory of her prom in the form of her two year-old son Boyd) who works as a waitress and is trying to go back to college. Middle daughter is Mandy (Molly Ephraim), a self-centered 17 year-old “girly girl” who loves to shop (as long as she’s spending her parents’ money), hang out with her boyfriend Travis and update her website, Mandyland. Finally there’s Eve (Kaitlyn Dever). She’s her father’s favourite largely because she a tomboy interested in all of the things he’s interested in, including sports and guns.

The most recent episode of Last Man Standing is a fairly typical one. There are two plotlines, a “Home” plotline and a “Work” plotline with the “Home” plotline being the dominant one of the two. This time around the story focuses on Mike always being the “good cop” of the parents in their relationship with their daughters – the one who says “yes” to whatever they want – while Vanessa feels that she’s forced onto the role of the “bad cop” – the one who always has to say “no”. This might have been fine when Mike was on the road so much but now that he’s back home it’s causing problems. One of the problems is that Mandy wants to enter the Denver audition for a reality show, America’s Next Hot Teen Model. There’s probably only going to be 10,000 girls there so she figures she’s got a pretty good shot. Her mom forbids it but Mike figures why not, since she’s too short anyways. Eventually Vanessa browbeats him into saying no as well. But that’s not enough to stop Mandy from doing what she wants to do. She enlists Kristin and Eve into helping her shoot some photos for a portfolio, but her full blown diva attitude alienates them and they walk out, without a photo being taken. Even that doesn’t stop Mandy. She can take her own photos with a remote control, and proceeds to do some shots that she thinks will work. Then she decides to do something a bit more provocative, and takes off her top. Of course it’s fine (as far as she’s concerned) because she’s got here hands over her breasts and you can’t see anything except the bottom of them sometimes.

Of course her parents find out – Kristin finds the pictures on the camera – and they both go ballistic. Pictures like these will get out and they have the potential to harm her future prospects if an employer or someone else finds them. They take the SD Card from the camera, but Mandy is one step ahead of them; she’s emailed the photos to her boyfriend Travis’s phone! So Mike has to go to Travis’s house. He’s practicing his trombone so his mother answers the door. When Mike mentions that the photos involve Mandy not wearing her top – even though nothing was showing – Travis’s mother calls the photos pornography, and says she should have known better than to allow Mandy in her house because she comes from such an “immoral” family. Proof of their immorality is that Kristin had a baby out of wedlock. Mike gets very angry at her over that, and rather than simply taking the pictures off the camera before Travis had the chance to see them, he drops the phone into a vase full of water. Which, as we find out, is not nearly as extreme as what Vanessa would have done if the woman had called Krisitin and Mandy immoral to her face; Vanessa says she would have “cut her.”

The Workplace plot of the show always takes second place to the Home storyline. In this episode, Ed is feeling left out because Mike is making marketing decisions (he is the marketing director) like moving the parkas out front in the stores and moving the fishing vests back – well it is nearly winter and fishing season is over. He feels like he’s losing some control of his business so he decides to do some marketing of his own. To promote the store’s selection of snowmobiles, he hires some local models – his “snowmo-bunnies” – to dress in fur bikinis and talk to customers. Initially Mike is fine with this – at least he is when he sees the sales figures that the models are ringing up – but he eventually ends the promotion before Ed wants it to end (when all of the snowmobiles are sold). It seems that in his argument with Mandy over her entering the America’s Next Hot Teen Model auditions she brought up the calendars featuring scantily clad models that he can’t get enough of. He said that “They aren’t my daughter,” to which she responded, “They’re somebody’s daughters.” It doesn’t hit home until he discovers that one of Ed’s “snowmo-bunnies” is a girl who went to school with Kristin. Needless to say, Ed isn’t happy about yet another decision being taken away from him, and all of his feelings come out. He’s afraid that Mike is trying to force him out of his own company, and that he’s at the age his father was when he retired. Retirement killed Ed’s father. Actually it was the husband of the woman that Ed’s father was having an affair with who killed him, but he wouldn’t have had time for that if he hadn’t retired. Mike reassures Ed that he’s not trying to force him out of the company and the whole crew at the store has a birthday party for him. That restores Ed to his normal, cranky, self as he complains about breaking the “no birthday party rule”, then about the cake and about their present (they had his chair reupholstered).

Last Man Standing is a pretty bad show that is getting pretty good ratings and a full season order because Tim Allen is in it. The three daughters are a pretty standard set of TV tropes; the smart tomboyish one, the self-centered shopping obsessed one, and the one trying to get her life on track. They’re a cookie cutter assortment of problems that could be fitted into just about any family sitcom. They really don’t have any discernable character traits beyond those that define the stereotype. Nancy Travis is fine as Mike’s wife Vanessa, but Vanessa is no Jill Taylor because Travis isn’t given the same sort of material that Patricia Heaton was given to work with, even at the start. As for Hector Elizondo, well casting him in this role seems like such a waste of a first rate character actor in a role that could be played by just about anyone.

The writing of this series shows little in the way of originality. It wouldn’t have been hard to take these characters and this concept and give it a real twist that would the people more “real” with more than one dimension. They have had solid situations to deal with – a teen taking inappropriate pictures of herself; “too sexy” Halloween costumes; a tomboy who wants to get a particular boy to “notice” her – but their approach to these situations has scarcely pushed the envelope in either developing their characters in these situations or taking a different direction. They seem most interested in going for the cheap and easy laugh. My big concern is how many of these decisions are flowing from series star Tim Allen through the Writers’ Room and onto the screen. Sure, I know that this show and this character fits into ABC’s current efforts to show the problems that face affluent married employed white men in modern society as comedy. And yes, I do get that part of the way to do that is to recycle a well remembered character (someone who is a lot like Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor) that fits right into that mould. But I think it does a disservice to the audience, because the show isn’t funny, and it does a disservice to its star.

You see, my big problem with Last Man Standing is that it’s not a property that is going to stretch Tim Allen’s acting ability. See here’s the shocking thing; I happen to think that Tim Allen has some acting ability. Oh he’s no Kelsey Grammer, let alone a Tom Hanks, but he is personable and shows more range as an actor than Roseanne Barr ever did (there’s a reason why Roseanne’s filmography is a tiny as it is – she’s a lousy actress). Maybe he couldn’t replace Steve Carell on The Office (but that might have been something to see if just for one episode) but he could have given us something new that represents the next step in his development as an actor. Instead, Allen is in a property that is a bad retread of what he did before on Home Improvement. And a car guy like Tim Allen should know that a retread rarely performs as well as a new tire. I’m sure that barring a catastrophic drop in ratings this show is going to be back next season. I just don’t think it should be. I just wish that Tim Allen would have waited for something better to come along. He deserves it, and we, as an audience, deserve it as well.

Sunday, November 06, 2011

I saw something interesting at Marc Berman’s page at TV Media Insights on Thursday. Apparently of twenty seven series that debuted this fall, thirteen of them have been given a full season order. Several other shows have been cancelled. Now the thing is that – if I’m not mistaken – November sweeps began on either Wednesday or Thursday, meaning that these thirteen seasons have been renewed before sweeps. Regardless of that I thought it might be of interest to look at the status of the shows from the 2011-12 shows.

ABC

Last Man Standing – Full season order Man Up – Status pending Suburgatory – Full season order Revenge – Full season order Charlie’s Angels – Cancelled after nine episodesOnce Upon A Time – Full season order Pan Am – Status pending. The network has ordered five additional scripts

CBS

2 Broke Girls – Full season orderUnforgettable – Full season orderHow To Be A Gentleman – Effectively cancelled after three episodesPerson Of Interest – Full season orderA Gifted Man – Status pending

FOX

Terra Nova – First season will end in December after 13 episodes. No information on renewal expected until May 2012 New Girl – Full season order I Hate My Teenaged Daughter – Debuts November 30, 2011X-Factor – First season will end on December 22, 2011. Has been renewed for a second season Allen Gregory – Status pending. Will be replaced by Napoleon Dynamite after 13 episodes

NBC

Playboy Club – Cancelled after three episodesUp All Night – Full season orderFree Agents – Cancelled after four episodesWhitney – Full season order. Will move to Wednesday nights (replacing Free Agents) from Thursdays when 30 Rock returns to Thursday night Prime Suspect – Status pending Grimm – Status pending

The CW

Hart Of Dixie – Full season order – 1.7/3Ringer – Full season order – 1.4/2H8R – Cancelled after 2 episodes, will be replaced by One Tree Hill January 11, 2012The Secret Circle – Full season order

Here are the overall audience (in Millions), overall position, rating in the 18-49 demographic and position in the demographic for each of these shows in their last airing. Shows that have a full season order or will be ending at mid-season are in red.